About Me
The Hartford Courant's editorial board doesn't mince words on Mr. "I Might Have Tacos": "Mayor Joseph Maturo is an idiot."
For those who are wondering why the East Haven Police Department is out of control, one possible answer is that Mayor Joseph Maturo is an idiot.
What other possible explanation is there for Mr. Maturo’s comments Tuesday night following the arrest of four East Haven police officers for violating, often brutally, the civil rights of Latinos? A New York television reporter asked Mr. Maturo what he was doing for the Latino community. (See the interview, by all means, at http://www.courant.com.) A moderately sentient public official in such a circumstance might say that he planned to meet with leaders of the community to apologize for the officers’ behavior and ask them to join him in making changes to prevent such unacceptable conduct.
Mr. Maturo responded by saying that he that he might go home and have tacos for dinner. He then rambled on with marginal coherence about other ethnic groups, mentioning his own Italian heritage (“I might have spaghetti”). We would bet that Italian Americans who’ve seen the video cringed.
In case you missed the video, here it is over here. (Thanks Matt)
On Friday, a brilliant morning sun piercing their eyes, 125 Americans-to-be got ready to take the citizenship oath on Liberty Island…
A speaker, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, ennobled the event by going off script. He urged the citizens to engage in civic life, to push for immigration reform so the undocumented will “not live in the shadows of fear, but come into the sunlight.” He did not mention how badly the government has failed that job. He did not mention the elected officials, Republicans mostly, who have urged punishment without mercy on those who violate laws that they refuse to reform.
But today, as we observe the 125th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, those words, inscribed at its base, have been turned on their heads. Many of Lazarus’s tired and poor may today be found in immigrant detention facilities, part of an enormous backlog of deportation cases that grows larger by the day. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security deported nearly 400,000 people; its secretary, Janet Napolitano, recently promised to increase removal cases to “historic levels.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement received more than $1.6 billion for removal and deportation in the last fiscal year. It can cost $23,000, by some estimates, to remove someone from the United States.
Meanwhile, jobs go begging: in Alabama, which passed the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant law; in Georgia, where the governor suggested using convicts to work in the fields after 11,000 jobs went unfilled; and in the orchards of Washington, where the flow to the far north has diminished mainly because of the recession.
Well then, why not hire only people with full citizenship? One farmer in Colorado, John Harold, tried doing just that, hoping to fill harvest positions with jobless locals looking for extra cash. But as my colleague Kirk Johnson reported, many of those locals did not last even a full day; they complained of the hard work in the onion fields of Colorado.
The problem, through good times and bad, is that there are millions of jobs that Americans will not do.
Demography 101 for Republican Candidates Numbers from 2010 US Census Data
